Cinema and Social Life in the Rural Gironde: Insights from an Oral History Project

Author(s):  
Corinne Marache
Keyword(s):  
2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Davis

Research has shown that the presence of children in the Jewish Israeli emigrant family intensifies their ambivalence about living abroad, but encourages greater involvement with fellow Israelis as they seek to transmit a Jewish Israeli identity and maintain their children’s attachment to the Jewish state. This article explores this assumption by focusing on the experiences of mothering of a group of Israeli emigrants in Britain. Based on twelve oral history interviews, it considers the issues of child socialisation and the mothers’ own social life. It traces how the women created a social network within which to mother and how they tried to ensure their children preserved a Jewish Israeli identity. The article also seeks to question how parenting abroad led the interviewees to embrace cultural and religious traditions in new ways.


2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (9-10) ◽  
pp. 890-906 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lukas Allemann ◽  
Stephan Dudeck

This article discusses ethical implications when sharing results in oral history research. We look at a case study of an Arctic community in Russian Lapland dealing with boarding school experiences. Bringing back research results about this topic provoked diverse reactions. We examine how the social life of stories and the social life of research are interconnected. By questioning the strict applicability of preformulated ethical research principles, we conclude that bringing back research results poses an opportunity to negotiate an appropriate form of reciprocity in research and to gain a deeper understanding of social processes in the communities under study. We identify principles of long-term engagement, collaborative methodologies, and inclusion into the cultural intimacy of the participating community as preconditions for a robust ground for ethics in oral history research.


Author(s):  
Виктория Владимировна Власова

Образы «других» являются неотъемлемой частью фольклорной картины мира, играя значимую роль в (само) идентификации этнических и конфессиональных групп. В ходе непосредственного общения формируются народные представления о конфессиональных особенностях «других», выделяется набор признаков, маркирующих их в качестве таковых. В статье рассматривается формирование и трансформация представлений о конфессиональном «другом» в моноэтничной поликонфессиональной среде на примере староверов-странников, проживавших в Удорском и Троицко-Печорском районах Республики Коми. Источниковой базой исследования послужили архивные данные и полевые материалы фольклорно-этнографических экспедиций, проходивших в начале 2000-х гг. Появление староверов-странников, позиционировавших себя как хранителей «истинной веры» и стремившихся максимально ограничить контакты с иноверцами, стало толчком для выделения этой группы в качестве конфессиональных «других». На верхней Печоре, на момент проведения исследований, страннические общины существовали; здесь сохранялась идеологическая конфронтация между разными группами верующих, что нашло отражение в различных локальных номинациях странников. На Удоре, где последователи странников исчезли в 1970-е гг., повсеместно использовался экзоконфессионим, не имевший оценочных коннотаций. Определяющее влияние на формирование представлений о странниках как о «других» оказали их религиозные практики. Ключевым показателем, характеризующим суть вероучения в глазах конфессиональных соседей, равно как и самих странников, стало «бегство от мира» — полный отказ от участия в государственной и общественной жизни, от любого взаимодействия с иноверцами. Не менее значимыми для системы представлений о данной группе были особенности погребальной обрядности (тайные похороны удорских странников) и крещения (крещение в пожилом возрасте). Закрытость повседневной и ритуальной жизни странников способствовала распространению слухов, компенсировавших отсутствие информации. Изменение исторических реалий (исчезновение удорских странников, изменение возрастного состава общин) вело к изменениям и коррективам существовавших представлений. The images of the Others are an integral part of the folklore worldview, also they play a significant role in the (self) identification of ethnic and confessional groups. Folk ideas about the confessional characteristics of the Others, as well as a set of features that allowed to mark them as the Others are formed in the course of direct communication. The article examines the formation and transformation of ideas about a confessional Other in a mono-ethnic and poly-confessional environment, using the example of Old-Believers Wanderers who lived in the Udorskii and Troitsko-Pechorskii districts of the Komi Republic. The article based on the archival data and field materials of folklore and ethno-graphic’ expeditions that took place in the early 2000s. The emergence of Wanderers, who were positioning themselves as keepers of the «true faith», and striving to limit contacts with non-Wanderers as much as possible, became the impetus for singling out this group as confessional Others. On the upper Pechora, where at the time of our research Wanderer’s communities existed, the ideological confrontation between different groups of believers were still persisted, that was reflected in various local nomination of Wanderers. On Udora, where the followers of the Wanderers disappeared in the 1970s, an outer nomination of this confessional group was widely used, which had no evaluative connotations. Their religious practices had a decisive influence on the formation of perceptions of the Wanderers as Others. The key indicator that characterizes the essence of the religion of the Wanderers in the eyes of their confessional neighbors, as for Wanderers themselves, was «flight from the world» – a complete refusal to participate in state and social life, and to have any interaction with representatives of the other faith. No less significant for the system of ideas about this group were the features of the funeral rituals (secret funerals of Udora’ Wanderers) and ritual of baptism (baptism in old age). The closedness of the daily and ritual life of the Wanderers contributed to the spread of rumors, which compensated the lack of information. Objective changes of the reality (the disappearance of Wanderers communities of Udora, the change in the age structure of the communities) led to changes and adjustments of the existing ideas.


Elore ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jari Ruotsalainen

Sailors’ tattoos are one of the stereotypical manifestations of this micro-group’s habits and norms. The article discusses sailors’ tattoos, their visual imagery, backgrounds and social meanings. The analysis is centred on ritualistic and social extensions linked to sailor tattoos. These are discussed in the framework of social identity and Goffman’s theories about social interaction as theatrical performance. The primary materials for the research are group and mutual oral history interviews that took place during the spring and summer of 2013 in Uusikaupunki, Helsinki, Kotka and Kuopio, Finland. The oldest of the nine interviewees was born in 1926 and the youngest in 1953. The article shows that old sailors want to distinctly separate their old tradition of tattooing from both the modern tattoo culture and prisoners’ tattoos. The landlubbers cannot make a difference between prisoners’ and sailors’ tattoos, and tattooing has not, since lately, been part of a normative representation of the human body. This has caused dramaturgical problems for the tattooed sailors in their social life. Old sailor tattoos are once respected and disappearing status symbols and marks of a unique professional group, hardworking men and a very masculine culture. Consequently, sailors’ tattoos are part of their social identity.


Author(s):  
Phan Thi Yen Tuyet

This paper explores conversations of fishermen and residents in island and coastal areas in southern Central and Southern Vietnam within the framework of maritime anthropology. The conversations are presented in the forms of narratives, storytellings and memories from three different approaches: narrative, oral history and life history. Deloyed in anthropology, history, literature, folklore and other disciplines, these approaches share one common character – interviewing as the means of data collection. Only through interviewing, a researcher is able to engage his/her subjects into the process of commemorating their lived experience, both individually and collectively. From fragmented memories and stories about the past to vivid representation of contemporary social reality of the people in island and coastal areas, the researcher then needs to “combine” them spatially and temporally to reconstruct a comprehensive narrative. If we fail to do that, these precious narratives would eventually vanish. To embed these narratives into the scientific stream of social life, we need to double-check, investigate, study and analyze them from multi-disciplinary perspectives. This is a real challenge to researchers; however, the information we achieve after “cleaning up data” is remarkably meaningful both scientifically and pragmatically.


2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Walters

Despite the welcome turn within security studies towards a more material- and practice-oriented understanding of state secrecy, the ways in which security actors experience, practise and negotiate secrecy in their everyday work lives has been rather overlooked. To counter this neglect the article calls for attention to everyday secrecy. Focusing on a former top-secret weapons research facility in the UK called Orford Ness, it uses oral history to give an account of ex-employees’ memories, experiences and practices concerning secrecy. Such a focus reveals that subjects make sense of procedures and rules of secrecy in ways that are sometimes surprising and unexpected. Ultimately this perspective emphasizes that secrecy is not just what governments and organizations prescribe and proscribe; it is also shaped by subjects who negotiate these rules. Everyday secrecy matters: as a perspective it shows that secrecy is not simply imposed by states and organizations from ‘above’; it is also made from ‘below’, albeit very asymmetrically.


2021 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 292-319
Author(s):  
Kelann Currie-Williams

Looking through the pages of family photo albums or the folders of photographic archival fonds can only be described as holding history in your hands. Whether it is in the form of colour or black and white prints, negatives, or slides, these photo-objects carry histories of lives lived that go beyond their frames. Focusing on a set of oral history interviews conducted with two Black women living in Montréal — a community photographer or image “maker” who was most active during the 1970s–1990s and a photo-collector or “keeper” who is currently active in preserving and sharing photographs for her church and wider communities within the city — this article engages with how the interweaving of photography and oral history gives us a rich way to experience the histories of Black social life in Montréal. Photo-led oral history interviews are sites for fruitful and in-depth conversation, providing interviewee and interviewer alike with the possibility of coming into encounter with everyday or minor histories that are too often overlooked. Moreover, this article is driven by a set entwined questions: How does oral testimony open up additional avenues for sharing the events of the past that have been captured through photographic images? What affective and relational qualities do photographs possess and how, in turn, do these qualities transform the space of the oral history interview? And, most urgently, why was photography used by Black Montréalers as a tool and a practice to remember and insist upon their collective presence?


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